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Bad Glass

I think I’ve always understood that I’m known around here as “that creepy girl” because I love all things scary and grotesque. It used to embarrass me when a co-worker would find a book about serial killers or zombies and immediately think of me. Little by little I’m embracing my creepiness. Some people knit. I like to read about monsters, human or otherwise. Bad Glass by Richard E. Gropp has everything I could ever want: things crawling out of walls, chase scenes, party scenes, inexplicable animals roaming through the park.

20-something Dean Walker drives from California to Spokane after hearing reports of evacuations and strange happenings in that city. He thinks of himself as a photojournalist who’s going to bust wide open the story of what’s really going on in Spokane. Remember dreams and ambition? Ah, to be 20 and ambitious again. Now when the TV remote falls on the floor in front of my chair that’s just too far away for me to bother with.

Dean slips through the military guard at the Spokane border and begins a bizarre journey that had me putting the book down several times. Books don’t often make me uneasy or make me look over my shoulder but I had to put this book down a couple of times. Dean walks through an abandoned hotel looking for pictures to take. He looks into one room and sees a man embedded in the ceiling, the man’s arm reaching down to a prone woman on the floor. The man hasn’t fallen through the ceiling but has somehow fused with it.

Wolves that don’t move like normal canines roam in enormous packs. Huge spiders pour through a wall that has a face with blinking eyes sticking out of it. The internet and radio are jammed so information about what is happening in Spokane is a mixture of rumors, fictions and truths. No one but the people who refused to evacuate the city know what’s really going on. Dean joins a group of misfits headed up by a mysterious beauty named Taylor who is using a teenaged computer hacker to get the story out of Spokane. Is something really happening or is it all just a hallucination?

This is a gem of a book that was brought to my attention by a co-worker (thanks, Carol). I’m that creepy girl who likes creepy things and Bad Glass is on my top ten list of creepy books. Read it. But stay away from Spokane and any walls that might have human limbs sprouting from them.